What is it like to be born a boy who was supposed to be a girl? What is it like to be born into the lower class, into the precariat, into the class of workers, craftsmen, farmers and unskilled factory workers in the West German provinces in the mid-1960s? What is it like to want to leave this predetermined, traditional path and, with the desire and help of literature, theater and art, to leave behind the origins from which one comes in order to “ascend” into another class that seems foreign to one? It is a seemingly hopeless endeavor. It is said that it takes four generations to change class.
The film KLASSENKAMPF deals with class politics and tells the portrait of a social background in a very subjective way based on the director’s biography, while also posing the question of class in a representative and exemplary way for many who come from the lower strata of society. (With eloquent support from Didier Eribon, Annie Ernaux and others – with the godfather of experimental cinema Jean-Luc Godard hovering and whispering over everything). Klassenkampf is a film in between, a dirty hybrid, a film between documentary digression and staged gimmickry, as a thesis film in a cinematic, narrative intervention.
